Hopping with Shortstat

7:50pm 4th September 2005

Shaun Inman's ShortStat software
is nothing but addictive, especially with the addition of the PathStats extension.
But never one to be satiated, and always one to be aroused by interactive visualisation of just this kind of data,
I have quickly knocked together the TravelStats extension, which displays a directed graph of the pages on the site,
with the thickness of the lines displaying the relative amount of people who 'hopped' between pages.
For a live preview, visit http://www.famfamfam.com/shortstat/hops.php (Requires java).
The graph uses the prefuse interactive visualization toolkit, and the data is an XML file
produced by a short hand-rolled PHP script. It is all a little haphazard at the moment, held together with bits of string
and duct tape, I will release the code if it seems as if anyone cares to actually visit enough.

In similar news: Mint, the spiritual successor to ShortStat,
will be apparently released on the 6th, undoing all of my hard(?) work.
Stats software is not hugely tricky to write, but as always Mr Inman and friends also manage to add just that extra
spikle of minty-freshness. Various bloggers have been evangelising their beta copies, all
strangely on the same day, and it does look interesting. Not that I am peppermint-green with envy at all (*wink*).